Lucid Dreams: The Artist Embodies Images From Her Dreams

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Plots and images come to her in a dream. Maybe that's why Elena Mar never makes sketches for her paintings. Dreams are the flip side of her life, in which the artist from Oryol feels more comfortable than in reality.

Restless soul

She always believed in dreams. Dreams became the alma mater for her paintings. And before that there was a "long road in the dunes" - the path of searches, mistakes, sensations. “I was fifteen when I felt like a person without skin,” says Elena. - Once I was walking down the street, behind the elderly women complaining in tired voices to each other about life, about illness - nothing special, everything is as usual. And suddenly, with every cell, I began to feel their words on my body. I walk down the street as if naked, I “see” all my muscles, I hear the blood pulsing in my veins. This happened to me quite often, then it passed with age. Perhaps this is how my sensitivity was formed. At about nineteen years old, I first saw the human aura. I thought that I was losing my sight, I was even scared. It looks like colored light rays flowing into each other. They usually pulsate higher and more intensely above the head, at the level of the solar plexus and along the shoulders. Objects also have an aura, it is more monotonous and contrasting."

Visions in color brought Elena to an art school, but her creative inclinations did not materialize. She had a talent for languages, and she entered the Faculty of Foreign Languages, however, she did not take root there either. The soul rushed about in search of its place in this life, but did not find it.

Bliss of light

For the first time she saw future pictures in dreams when she was a little over thirty. I knew that these were not just dreams, I felt that visions should be given life, making them a reality. The artist calls them the thresholds of the subconscious, layers, plasmas. “I had a difficult period in my life then. It was as if I was not living, but slowly dying. Once I lay down, closed my eyes and thought that I would not get up. And suddenly I felt as if I was falling into some space, making my way through invisible layers of energies that were completely different from each other. In one of the layers, time was wasted and wasted. I drowned in it, got out, drowned again and rose again. Then there was a strange layer where I didn't feel anything. There were many layers, they were as if they were alive. I moved through them through the tunnel. When the light flashed at the end, it became easy for me - complete bliss. Then I saw bright, pulsating pictures of the finest work, as if written with a needle, and I realized that I had to try to repeat them. What did this trip give me? I realized that I would live and see the light."

The graphics "Abduction of Consciousness" are a tribute to the "visit" to the world of dreams: two huge birds and a naked girl thrown onto the ocean shore - all in lilac-green cold tones. The painting "Off the Coast of Egypt" seethes to the brim with the "feelings" of the Red Sea, which emphasize the sharp outlines of the skeleton of an Egyptian ship drowning in blue-terracotta waves. The work was written in the early 90s (like most others), when Elena could not even imagine that in fifteen years she would visit there. Then there were "Angels at the Kremlin Wall", as the artist claims, angels of different religions … Why and where did they enter the winter metropolis in times of change, breaking their snow-white wings on earthly human passions?

She has a watercolor on the theme of unearthly love - "One step from the ground": two demonically attractive stylized figures, merged with each other in the heavenly space from … chromium oxide. And a whole freak show of shells, jellyfish and sea symbols. “The marine theme is closest to me,” the artist admits.- Maybe in one of my past lives I lived by the sea or ocean. After all, no one can say for sure whether this is self-deception or truth - existence in other bodies and even in other dimensions."

Color and word

When her dreams release her imagination, she realizes that this is a "rest" for the brain. She turns on her favorite music and begins to pour paints and varnishes on the paper, in the spots she finds what her imagination wants to see. And then the most sacred moments come when you can pick up a brush in order to give life to beings that have arisen from the subconscious, tracing the images that have emerged. In fact, this is the same state of sleep, but with a brush in hand.

Revived images are capricious, like people. One day Elena left the studio without adding a face in one of the paintings. The farther from the workshop I went, the more alarming were the feelings, as if they were calling voices from the picture. Had to go back to finish the job.

In 2000, the artist unexpectedly turned to journalism. Perhaps, with the help of dreams, a new path was suggested, at the beginning of which stories about artists, musicians, actors, and poets appeared. Then there was social journalism: defending the interests of people in courts and investigative committees, business trips to orphanages, helping the sick and disabled in nursing homes. Social journalism is rarely light in color. But this is Elena's way.

Poems, sometimes leading to the world of illusions, sometimes burning with their truthfulness, became the creative parallel of the paintings. In words, as in pictures, colors and images appeared. One of the visitors to her exhibition was surprised: "Look, they even have smells … This is some other dimension, but I went there and saw what is happening today and, perhaps, will happen."

She always draws something in a notebook, attending almost all journalistic events. He says that the hand itself deduces signs, symbols, faces. Creativity is like breathing: a living person cannot but breathe.